Tonight. After some serious relationship-centric admin, Ian drove me to Wimbledon to the clinic. It's good to know that my hard earned tax pounds count for something - mainly my choice of contraception. I only have to pitch up on 18:15 on a Wednesday once every six months, have my blood pressure taken, the nurse asking the series of questions I've so become accustomed to, my sleeve is up before she asks. She believes the weight I tell her; it's true, so inconsequential, but the scale on the floor is left untouched anyway.
I asked Ian to stay in the car. The awkward looks that accompanying boyfriends and husbands throw around the waiting room don't need contributing to. Even with a room full of only women, with only female nurses and female doctors, the room is always tense with a sort of reverence for fertility. Or perhaps, more realistically, a reverence for the anti-fertility that the nurse hands through the hatch to me. Six packs of small white reassurances.
It's nothing new for me. I've been on these for seven years now. I joke that I don't know if I'm even capable anymore. Not that I want it right now. Conflicting stories of long-term pill use contributing to cancer growth and, alternately, preventing it. These aspects hit me when I enter the clinic, but hurrying out of the cold, into the car, package in hand, it's long gone.
Interestingly, the NHS family clinics only provide cervical smears once every three years now.
This is a 
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